Friday, February 22, 2008

My husband is skiving work, sitting by me readingg

The electricity man has been and gone (and completed a very nifty and efficient removal of our old "spinning wheel of death" meter and replaced with new digital meter), and the health visitor has also visited. Left some useful leaflets and an NHS book called "Birth to Five" which looks as though it will be really helpful. Apparently I should have also received the "Pregnancy" volume from the midwife...but no show on that!

The health visitor will basically take over looking after us and the baby once the midwife's remit finishes at about 10 days. Health visitors are all trained nurses, and will be looking after us until our child starts school, at which point a school nurse takes over. There appears to be somewhat of a shortage of health visitors in the area, so we won't get many fixed visits after the first few months, but she emphasised that they're only a phone call away and will always come out and see us if we need help. That is very reassuring! I had thought she would want to look round the house, check where the baby's going to sleep etc, but she didn't - just took some basic details and brief medical histories for each of us and our respective sides of the family.

Had last ante-natal Parent Craft class last night which was pretty good and covered a wide selection of topics - induced labour, forceps, ventouse...all those nice things, but also bathing and putting baby to bed, a bit on breast feeding and we finally watched a video called "the Social Baby" demonstrating how babies are ready to communicate and be social right from birth. Oh so looking forward to meeting my little one now!

Also had an exciting parcel delivery this morning - 10 Kinsey Millhone books and 2 surprise matinee jackets from friends in Nottingham. Fantastic! Sadly this means that Don Quixote may need to be shelved for now - I'm only about 80 pages through this weighty tome. I thought I would be all literate and clever by reading it after it's closely referred to in The Shakespeare Secret (also recently read), and I have had a copy for many years now "meaning to get round to reading it" but....haven't really got into the swing of it yet, so I'll have to try and return to it between Kinsey, Dr Who and the Series of Unfortunate Events books which I'm also working through!

Finally, just been out to the shop to get out of the house for today and bought a KitKat for each of us to have with a mug of tea - L has just found the holy grail of the KitKat world - a completely chocolate finger. Mmmmmm.

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